Witcher, actually stable on XP?

drunkenmaster

drunkenmaster

drunkenmaster

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After many frustrating crashes trying to play the witcher on Windows 7, where it does play but crashes randomly, in ways that seem to be fairly common for any vista/windows 7 user, wondering if just installing XP on a partition and playing from there is the way to go.

Is it actually stable on XP, or is it still a POS buggy pain in the ass.

OR am I missing something that will make the game stable in windows 7 or Vista. I was planning on sticking Vista on a second partition anyway but I can put XP on for now, infact I guess for other games that aren't so good on Vista I could leave XP on as backup.

ANyway, any idea's for making the game stable, ati driver options, something incompatible, anything, its doing my head in by not only crashing like other games have done, but its hard locking my comp with every crash, sometimes loading in for the first time, after 5 mins or very very occasionally after a couple of hours.
 
bah, guess I'll give it a try then, haven't used XP in ages, feeling all nostalgic so might aswell have a look :p

I really can't understand why its so insanely unstable though, was it out in 2007, you'd think they'd have fixed, well, most of it by now.

Whats truly embarassing is, STalker, the first one was buggy as hell but playable and never hard locked my comp, the Stalker sequal was even worse in terms of buggyness, but both were mostly fixed within a couple of months. This is buggier and basically unplayable at the moment, and over a year later is still completely useless. Maybe, just maybe I'd give them a break if Vista was brand new now, and it was just unstable on vista, this just doesn' thave the the excuse.

Thing is, I can't name another game that will hard lock my comp if it crashes, also if it crashed but I can still "use" windows and kill the .exe in task manager, the .exe doesn't actually get killed, just hangs there for a few minutes till the computer crashes again. I don't think i've ever seen task manager fail to kill an .exe before.
 
Just yesterday I installed my shiny new Witcher Enhanced Edition to my XP SP3, applied the latest hotfix and a mod that ads walking option to the OTS view, and it all works like a charm.No crashes, no bugs, better inventory, stellar framerate...beautiful.Especially the load times are insanely short, compared the the original version 1.1a that I played a year ago.It even workes without DVD in drive.
 
Never had any major issues/crashes with this game on either XP32 or Vista64. Even back when it first came out before the main patches(1.2, 1.3) it was stable on XP apart from some known in-game bugs at the time. The long loading times everyone was complaining about seemed minor to me also, 5-15 secs pre Witcher Enhanced. Played through a second time on Vista64 without issues with Witcher: EE.
 
well even more smegged off now. Been so long since I installed XP i completely forgot about the whole needing a floppy disk to install raid drivers, I can't even get a cable into the floppy drive connector without taking half the case apart so not bothering with that.

Its doing my head in, a lot of issues seem to be with autosave, but completely unsolveable, some areas seem to fail without question every time with autosave enabled, and just to be a pain, some quests do the opposite and fail to work unless autosave is disabled. Its frankly ridiculous and I can't for the life of me work out whats causing it at all.

The thing is the game won't crash with an error code, just hard locks nothing else, no bluescreens, can't narrow it down except for the fact the computer only crashes playing the witcher.

Hmm, its been ages, can you add drivers into a install cd so I can burn it with the relevant amd drivers on to recognise the drive without the f6 floppy bit? I really can't remember.
 
Anything in the application or system event logs? Right click My Computer, select manage, event viewer and have a look in there.
 
drunkenmaster said:
After many frustrating crashes trying to play the witcher on Windows 7, where it does play but crashes randomly, in ways that seem to be fairly common for any vista/windows 7 user, wondering if just installing XP on a partition and playing from there is the way to go.

Is it actually stable on XP, or is it still a POS buggy pain in the ass.
Click to expand...
Sounds like a hardware issue possibly. The game is incredibly buggy though given that it is the work of a first time Polish outfit.

On XP and Vista it should be solid. If you're getting CTD's like I initially did on Vista then uninstall and wipe everything and then reinstall. My first initial install was so bad that it was common for me to get about 3 CTD's within the first 5mins of play.

The enhanced edition should have fixed a lot of the crashing issues though.
 
Kainz said:
Sounds like a hardware issue possibly. The game is incredibly buggy though given that it is the work of a first time Polish outfit.

On XP and Vista it should be solid. If you're getting CTD's like I initially did on Vista then uninstall and wipe everything and then reinstall. My first initial install was so bad that it was common for me to get about 3 CTD's within the first 5mins of play.

The enhanced edition should have fixed a lot of the crashing issues though.
Click to expand...

thing is I've recently played, well, a whole lot. Had Win 7 on for around a month and played dozens of hours without issue, finished Fear 2 a few days ago without an issue. Whats often the problem after one complete pain in the ass piece of software crashing so much is, multiple crashes and not shutting down properly, can start to introduce problems with the windows install, that just make the crashing worse.

It didn't really feel like hardware due to the fact that, other people with similar setups are fine and the crashes were totally random and lots of other people get them.

Doing an n-lite win xp with raid drivers added so praying its the right drivers etc and it will install fine. Will pretty much put drivers on a fresh install, cat's, mobo, sound, windows update and game, see if it works or not. Frustratingly I expect it will work better.

WIth windows 7, i built a new comp so didn't have a "backup" install, I had expected it to suck with something so bad I'd end up just using it a few days and giving up but really till the witcher I've not had a single game/app not work on it. there had to be one app that refused to work well though, there's always one.
 
ok, so thats my head just about imploding, one of the main reasons I was getting irked is I was fighting the beast, quite early in the game and it was crashing extensively, meaning reboot and sitting through, even skipping dialogue, about 3 loading times and lots of stuff to skip just to get to a fight that would crash, also a heavily stupidly bugged fight that I keep losing, loading and crashing.

I finally got the game to work for more than 5 minutes, went back to a much earlier save, did loads, got extra talent points, got to the fight, no crashes, beat the Beast first time, beat the fight straight after, and it crashed before I could save after it :(


stupid, stupid, stupid game.
 
awesome, awesome, awesome game.

Though I can understand how frustrating that must be...good that my system handles every single game without crashes or problems : ).
 
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